Occupy Wall Street. Remember them? Well, in that well worn cliched phrase: They haven’t gone away you know!
One of the more successful actions of the Belfast group was occupying the old Belfast stock exchange on Royal Avenue, thereby flagging up latent resources.
OWS is going to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT. (If you’re a debt broker, once you own someone’s debt you can do whatever you want with it — traditionally, you hound debtors to their grave trying to collect. We’re playing a different game. A MORE AWESOME GAME.)
To set the stage, here is a quote from a top Reagan era economist.
“Paul Craig Roberts:“As readers know, I don’t think that either candidate is a good choice or that either offers a choice. Washington is controlled by powerful interest groups, not by elections. What the two parties fight over is not alternative political visions and different legislative agendas, but which party gets to be the whore for Wall Street, the military-security complex, Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and energy, mining, and timber interests.”
Now imagine a populist revolt that eliminates absentee owners and declares local to global debt jubilees, much as the IMF is (rather radically) considering in The Chicago Plan Revisted (August 2012), while the local, state, and federal government also agree on the Automated Payment Transaction Tax or the Tobin Tax (two different ideas that can be implemented separately or together).
In October of 2011, New Scientist reported that a scientific study on the global financial system was undertaken by three complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. The conclusion of the study revealed what many theorists and observers have noted for years, decades, and indeed, even centuries: “An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.” As one of the researchers stated, “Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market… Our analysis is reality-based.” Using a database which listed 37 million companies and investors worldwide, the researchers studied all 43,060 trans-national corporations (TNCs), including the share ownerships linking them.[1~footnotes at the end of the article]
“There is no longer any excuse to remain ignorant of the vast peer-to-peer landscape that is slowly but surely replacing the obsolete, monopolistic, and competitive institutions of yesterday. This authoritative survey of the emerging collaborative economy may shock businesspeople and scare bankers, but it sure encourages me.”
This month we have been serialising the report “Synthetic overview of the collaborative economy”, coproduced by Orange Labs and the P2P Foundation. All posts on the report and the serialised chapters can be found hereand there is a lively discussion over on facebook too!
Phi Beta Iota: Governments are failed systems, whatever their intentions. We are moving away from predatory capitalism that thrives on information asymmetries, and toward a moral collaborative economy that not only thrives on shared information, but reveals true costs and lowers all costs. Michel Bauwens and Douglas Rushkoff are two of the foremost pioneers in this arena.
NEW YORK — November 2, 2012 — For decades, “bigger is better” has been the conventional path to efficiency in industries ranging from transportation to power generation. Food once grown on small family plots now comes overwhelmingly from factory farms. Vessels that carried 2,000 tons of cargo have been replaced by modern container ships that routinely move 150,000 tons. But now, new research shows, we are on the cusp of a radical shift from building big to building small—a change that has profound implications for both established and emerging industries.
Abstract: At the height of the Great Depression a number of leading U.S. economists advanced a proposal for monetary reform that became known as the Chicago Plan. It envisaged the separation of the monetary and credit functions of the banking system, by requiring 100% reserve backing for deposits. Irving Fisher (1936) claimed the following advantages for this plan: (1) Much better control of a major source of business cycle fluctuations, sudden increases and contractions of bank credit and of the supply of bank-created money. (2) Complete elimination of bank runs. (3) Dramatic reduction of the (net) public debt. (4) Dramatic reduction of private debt, as money creation no longer requires simultaneous debt creation. We study these claims by embedding a comprehensive and carefully calibrated model of the banking system in a DSGE model of the U.S. economy. We find support for all four of Fisher's claims. Furthermore, output gains approach 10 percent, and steady state inflation can drop to zero without posing problems for the conduct of monetary policy.
Phi Beta Iota: The radical sensibility of this paper, which essentially ends the reign of financial terrorism by Goldman Sachs et al, certainly suggests that in 2011, when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was set up by a maid later found to have been paid, there was already a major schism between Wall Street and the IMF–or among the IMF member states. The paper is breathtakingly brilliant, with all due credit to its antecedents, and we can only hope that the current head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, will make this the centerpiece of her administration. The other half is the Automated Payment Transaction Tax (APT), which not only doubles or triples government revenue, but also eliminates tax codes and other regulatory means by which legislatures and executives extort money
After the highly successful 1st International Commons Conference, there will be a second and even larger international gathering focused on the Economics of the Commons, in Berlin, May 2013.
Organized by the Commons Strategies Group (with support of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung and the FPH – Fondation pour le Progrès de l’Homme), there was a preparatory meeting in Bangkok, October 12-14. You can find a text and and series of essential questions prepared by the Commons Strategies Group for the Bangkok meeting, in our Community Knowledge Garden, and in the Commons Rising community forum, where you can engage in the conversation about them and suggest yours.
The 49 questions are organizied in the following sections:
